Robert Boyers Recalls 'Maestros & Monsters - Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner'

Author of hundreds of essays and a dozen books, Robert Boyers, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss his newest book, Maestros and Monsters: Days and Nights with Susan Sontag and George Steiner. Categorized as a memoir, this book is about Boyers’ close friendships with both Sontag and Steiner, both brilliant and intellectual minds, who despised each other and only came together during a few instances throughout their lives. He explained, “Actually, I was very close to both of these people and I wrote about them, about their work, several different times over the decades. Then in February of 2020, George Steiner died at the age of 90. He was a very close friend of mine. He was my teacher in graduate school… and his granddaughter was a student here at Skidmore College where my wife and I teach and we were with her when she was grieving and so on, and I thought I would write a little memoir about George. As I got into it, I realized I really had a book to write and the further along I went I thought it would be really interesting to put them together with Susan Sontag, two writers who disliked one another, to put it mildly… Both of them wondered how we could bear to be close to the other one… They never got together anytime in their entire lives except on several occasions when they were invited to appear at the same place…”

One of the chapters that Boyers includes in his book is about a time, back in 1990, when Steiner invited him to attend one of his classes on Shakespeare at the University of Geneva. These classes were given about once a week in a large auditorium and focused on one Shakespeare play each semester. Boyers recalls, “…in that auditorium, many, many, many hundreds of people were present, only a small number of them were students at the University of Geneva. Most of the people there were people who traveled to Geneva each week to attend George Steiner’s Shakespeare class. Many of them were middle-aged or older business people, stockbrokers, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and they were coming in on trains and planes from different places in Europe to attend this class. Many of them that I had met had been attending it for 10 years already and they hoped to go through all 37 Shakespeare plays with George Steiner. He was just regarded as the Great Maestro and he was always interesting, scrupulous at going through the text. Can you imagine an entire semester devoted to one play? Very close reading and that seemed to all of these people… completely thrilling, and Steiner seemed the perfect teacher… I just thought George had grown tremendously as a teacher and, in many ways, as a human being in the 25 years between the time he was my teacher in graduate school and the time I saw him do this class, and I just felt I had to include that chapter in the book.”

As for the reason why Steiner and Sontag may have had such an intense dislike for one another, Boyers speculated that it may have been due to their competitive natures. He remarked, “They were in their ways, I think, very competitive with one another. They often wrote about the same things almost at the same time… there were parallels of that sort all through their careers in spite of the fact that they were also very different, and had in some cases, [had] very different interests… They were different, they weren’t the same, but nevertheless, they were highly competitive and they were certainly, for a period of about 30 or 40 years, they were two of the most prominent writer intellectuals in the world. They had a following, both of them, that was quite enormous and this was easily measurable. When either one of them gave a public lecture, a vast audience would arrive to be there and their books sold large numbers of copies… They really were similar in certain ways, profoundly different in other ways, and always very competitive.”